The Princess Bride (1987)

Here is a film from 1987, a year when a swashbuckling fairy tale could be assembled without a committee of consultants reviewing each sword fight for ideological balance. Rob Reiner and William Goldman built their story around a grandfather reading a book to a sick grandson, a frame that keeps the whole affair at a comfortable distance from sincerity. Then come the pirates, the giant, the Spaniard with a grudge, and the princess who spends most of the running time being carried off by one party or another. The tone is affectionate mockery. The ambition is a good joke told cleanly.

Buttercup exists to be loved and rescued, and the film never apologizes for this. Her one act of defiance is a shove into a ravine, after which she tumbles down the hill herself. Fezzik's enormous body is a source of comedy and lifting power, not a statement about beauty standards. The kingdom of Florin is populated entirely by pale English-speaking performers, and nobody in the narrative pauses to remark on it. Prince Humperdinck is a villain because he is cruel and vain, not because he owns the means of production. The Fire Swamp is a hazard, not an ecosystem in crisis. There is no character here who is gay, none coded as such, and no subtext that a determined graduate student could extract without a crowbar. Inigo Montoya grieves his father and seeks revenge. That is the whole of his interior life, and it is enough.

The film's only sermon concerns true love and the value of a well-timed "As you wish." It lectures no one. It won a Hugo, it sits in the National Film Registry, and it has spent nearly four decades being quoted at dinner parties by people who mean it fondly. We file it accordingly.